YouTube in Music Video Deal With Universal — YouTube and Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to create a new online hub for music videos called Vevo. It will be the latest of many efforts by YouTube, which is owned by Google …

YouTube Is Doomed — YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise …

Bluetooth 3.0 Is Ready for Prime Time — The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is set to announce the Bluetooth 3.0 specification later this month. Bluetooth 3.0 will feature dramatically increased speeds, allowing for the transfer of large video files, music collections and photo libraries wirelessly ‘within seconds’.

Microsoft Breaks Up Its Live Labs Group — Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is downsizing its high-profile Live Labs group, which was created three years ago to speed up innovation in the company's online business, paidContent.org has learned. — The group, whose mission has been to hatch new ideas …

New in Labs: Sender time zone — Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight.

Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere — In the past week, both Joshua Schachter and Matt Haughey published articles that were excerpted in the Voices section of All Things Digital, a web site owned by Dow Jones and run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the WSJ.

iPhone To Get Qualcomm's ‘FLO TV’ Mobile TV — One reason that Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile television division has had a slow start: It's only available on select phones that have a special chip inside them. That's currently about 9 phones of roughly 100-plus in the U.S. market …

Digg Search: Now With 99.987% Less Suck — An apology is due - until today, Digg's search has been pretty terrible. I'm really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it's awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.

France Rejects Plan to Curb Internet Piracy — PARIS — In a major blow for President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to crack down on Internet piracy, the French National Assembly on Thursday rejected legislation that would have cut off the Internet connections of persistent copyright violators.

Apple to disable .Mac website tools in July — MobileMe subscribers using legacy .Mac website tools have been warned by Apple that the .Mac Groups and HomePage features will be discontinued in July, leaving existing pages live but taking away the ability to edit or update them.

The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable's data caps — Time Warner Cable is expanding its test markets for paltry Internet data caps. Ars breaks down the obscene price per gigabyte that the company thinks is “fair.” — Time Warner Cable, stung by online criticism of its paltry traffic caps …

Avoid the Apple Tax - Cash in on the value of Windows — With the ailing global economy, I am looking at ways I get better value for my money. One way I can do this if I need to replace a computer is by avoiding the “Apple Tax.” — Microsoft sponsored a new whitepaper (PDF) …

Amazon launches BlackBerry app; Leaves Storm out — Updated: Amazon followed up its iPhone application with one for the BlackBerry, but only folks with trackball devices need to bother with the download. The BlackBerry Storm isn't supported. — The company said in a statement Thursday …

Cisco to Buy Tidal as Part of Its Data Center Rush — Cisco this morning said it plans to acquire Tidal Software for $105 million in cash as part of its expansion into the data center. Tidal, which raised venture money from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Panorama Capital …

Yelp Gives Small Businesses a Louder Voice — Small businesses will soon feel a little more love in their love-hate relationship with Yelp, the review site. — Yelp will begin allowing small business owners to respond publicly to reviews they think are incorrect.

The neverending story — Last night the Kido (aka Conficker/ Downadup) botnet kicked into action - what everyone's been on the lookout for since 1st April. — The computers infected with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Kido (aka Conficker.c) contacted each other over P2P, telling infected machines to download new malicious files.

Yahoo Loses Toolbar Deals; Search Share To Drop? — The Wall Street Journal reports that the loss of two agreements with computer makers could cost Yahoo as much as 15% of its search traffic in the next 12-18 months. — Early this year, HP made Live Search the default search toolbar on its computers.